North Korean military personnel carry flags during an opening ceremony for a newly constructed Korean War museum in Pyongyang that was officially opened Saturday to mark the 60th anniversary of the Korean War armistice.

SEOUL, South Korea — In a stage-managed display of military might, tanks, missiles and blocks of goose-stepping soldiers rolled through the wide streets of Pyongyang on Saturday, marking the 60th anniversary of what North Korea calls its “victory” in a war whose combat ended in a draw.

The massive military parade, North Korea’s first in more than a year, was designed both as a showcase for its 30-year-old leader’s strength and as a warning to the foreign neighbors Pyongyang often threatens. The North showed off a procession of ballistic missiles mounted on mobile launchers — although experts note some of the models might not yet be operational.

The event offered the latest reminder of North Korea’s bent for image-making at a time of increasing international isolation. The parade involved tens of thousands of participants, whose synchronized movements were honed during weeks of training at an airport in the capital, according to satellite images.

Kim Jong-Un, the authoritarian nation’s third-generation leader, watched from an observation deck in Pyongyang’s central square. State television footage showed Kim, wearing a dark Mao-style suit, clapping and whispering to older officials around him, including visiting Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao. But Kim did not make a speech, as he had during the previous parade in April 2012.

For the event, the North granted invitations to a handful of foreign journalists, who are normally barred from the secretive nation.

One photograph from the aftermath of the midday parade, shared on Twitter, showed exhausted soldiers either sitting or holding on to one another to stay upright.

“Soldiers collapsed from heat exhaustion,” Ivan Watson, a CNN correspondent visiting Pyongyang, wrote on Twitter. “It was scorching hot for hours under the sun.”

Sixty years after signing the armistice, North and South Korea remain in what South Korean President Park Geun-Hye calls a state of “uneasy peace.”

In central Seoul on Saturday, Park delivered a somber address to several thousand people at a war memorial. She called for a halt to “hostilities” between the two Koreas and asked the North to behave more responsibly.

In the past decades, the North has launched a string of attacks on the South, including a commercial airplane bombing and assassination attempts. More recently, in 2010, the North torpedoed a South Korean Navy ship and shelled a South Korean island, killing a total of 50.

“I will not accept any provocations that threaten the lives and properties of our people,” Park said, according to the South’s Yonhap news agency.

The South acknowledges the three-year Korean War as a tragic draw in which about 2 million people died after the North invaded on June 25, 1950. The demilitarized zone created by the armistice runs along nearly the same line as the border between the Koreas before the war.

In the North’s version of events, however, there was neither a draw nor a North Korean invasion. North Korean textbooks say the war — known as the Fatherland Liberation War — was started by “U.S. imperialists” who wanted to dominate Asia. Historians say this narrative is utterly fabricated and contradicts the accounts provided by veterans, declassified documents and government officials from the more than 20 countries that became involved in the war.

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